ABSTRACT
The linguist approaches the problem of questioned authorship from the theoretical position that every native speaker has their own distinct and individual version of the language they speak and write, their own idiolect, and the assumption that this idiolect will manifest itself through distinctive and idiosyncratic choices in speech and writing. The term idiolect seems to have been used fi rst by Bloch in 1948, although McMenamin (2002) traces the underlying concept back to the Biographia Literaria written in the early nineteenth century by the English poet Coleridge.
